Please read this. I’m guessing you won’t. After all, this is just a lonely blog here in the Bay Area, a wilderness region on the west coast. I am certain that there are probably more important things to do at league headquarters on Park Avenue in New York.

However.

As we all know, the Super Bowl will be played here in Santa Clara next February at Levi’s Stadium. But as I have come to realize from my reporting over the past few months, many of the important decisions about what will happen Super Bowl week are being made right now by you folks back in NYC. I’m talking here about choices such as where the two competing teams will practice and stay, where the NFL award and celebration ceremonies will be held, where the major corporate hospitality will take place, where the league will set up league-sanctioned “party zones” for fans to gather. Stuff like that.

I also know that from May 18-20, just a month from now, NFL meetings with owners and executives are scheduled in San Francisco. And the logical scuttlebutt is that this will be the time when those decisions will be announced.

In going back over all the interviews I have done for this Super Bowl 50 blog with folks involved in the local hosting effort–you can go back and read them in previous installments–it’s apparent that Host Committee officials are working together pretty well. They have made certain that the philanthropic benefits of the game are being spread around all of the Bay Area counties. They have made sure the signage and logos proclaim this to be the Bay Area Super Bowl, not the San Francisco Super Bowl. They are trying to meld the different geographic and business and political interests of the Bay Area into a region-wide celebration.

Yet it’s also apparent that the major decisions about key elements of that celebration, the ones I mention above, are out of the committee’s hands. They fall squarely in the mitts of Park Avenue.

So that kind of makes me nervous. Here’s why: A couple of months ago, 49ers owner Jed York told me something that I found a little surprising, though in retrospect I shouldn’t have been shocked. York was talking about his front office’s role in the Super Bowl planning, which according to him includes an educational role.

“You don t realize how far San Francisco is from New York,” York said. “People don t come to San Francisco a ton from the league office. They might come for a game or two a year. But they re not connected to the community like they would be some of the cities closer to New York. So it s really just trying to explain to them, What are the differences between Santa Clara and San Francisco? How close are they? How can we connect things?’ And making sure that the public transportation and those things, they understand. Because when you re not here, you don t really know how it connects.

I assume that you league honchos have been absorbing all this information from the 49ers, as well as doing some research of your own. Here’s what I hope you have learned: The Bay Area is a market unlike any other in the United States. It’s certainly the most difficult to get your arms around and assess.

There’s no other region like this, with three major cities, each of which has their own personalities and none of which contains the “average” Bay Area resident. The region’s population is about 7.5 million. San Jose is the largest city at roughly a million. San Francisco is next at around 850,000. Oakland is approximately 410,000.

But here’s the key part: Add up those three populations. They total 2.25 million — or less than half of the Bay Area total. That means most of the region’s residents live in none of those cities. They live in cities surrounding or in between all three of them. And they look to each of those three cities for different things.

San Francisco is Northern California’s flagship municipality, largely because it is undeniably the tourist and postcard capital of the Bay Area, with the best scenery and the most hotel rooms and the most trendy restaurants. You could also call it the region’s financial center, though the folks at Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto would argue. But with just one current major pro franchise doing business in San Francisco — the Giants — you could hardly call it the area’s sports capital.

Oakland, meanwhile, is the port city with a working class soul and has developed its own brand of hipness and foodie reputation. San Jose is the mongrel urban/suburban city of wild diversity and awesome ethnic restaurants and relentless shopping malls. Berkeley and Palo Alto are the academic capitals. Napa and Sonoma are the wine chillers. Santa Clara County is the business capital, with more Fortune 500 companies than San Francisco and Alameda Counties combined. Entertainment venues are spread all over the place, from the Warfield in San Francisco to the Fox in Oakland to Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View to the Greek Theatre in Berkeley to the Mountain Winery in Saratoga. And that’s not even counting all the arena shows at Oracle in Oakland and SAP Center in San Jose.

The official Super Bowl 50 host city, per the area’s bid to the league a few years ago, is San Francisco. That makes sense in terms of where most out-of-town visitors will be housed. San Francisco is used to hosting the largest conventions. But the hoo-hah and fun of Super Bowl week is not supposed to be just for out-of-towners. It’s also supposed to be for those football fans in the region.

In that regard, I don’t think any survey is necessary to determine that there are far more NFL fans in the East Bay and South Bay than in San Francisco, both in terms of raw numbers and percentage. In fact, the 49ers recently revealed that they have more season ticket holders in Sacramento than they do in San Francisco. Yes, Sacramento.

All of which is to say that, if the NFL chooses to make Super Bowl Week 2016 too San Francisco-centric . . . well, then the league has not been doing its homework. Did it learn a lesson two years ago when the Super Bowl was played in New Jersey but set up almost all of its party-type stuff in midtown Manhattan? Ten blocks of Broadway were even closed to traffic to erect a NFL party zone that was open to the public. It was popular among those who traveled to the game from out of town. But privately, league voices expressed disappointment that the crowds weren’t larger because many locals didn’t show up and participate.

The same dynamic could take place this time, if the NFL ignores the market dynamics. Will Raiders fans from Castro Valley really take a midweek afternoon off and journey into San Francisco to visit the NFL Experience and buy tee shirts at the SuperStore? Will 49ers fans from Mountain View, just a few miles from Levi’s Stadium, be motivated enough to travel more than 40 miles to San Francisco just to drink a beer at an officially licensed NFL Bud Light booth?

The mistake made by America’s Cup organizers two years ago, in my mind, was in making the event a purely San Francisco enterprise, confining everything largely to the small areas around Pier 27 and Marina Green. There wasn’t an effort to build enthusiasm for the America’s Cup atmosphere at various marinas around the bay or maybe even finding a way to get people in San Jose and the South Bay geeked up about it — by either having some of the boats visit different spots or creating land-based functions with some of the sailors and equipment on display. As a result, not many people outside San Francisco cared much. Even though the America’s Cup was a very cool event with an extremely dramatic finish, it was a financial flop.

The Super Bowl will never be a flop. It will make tons of money, no matter what. But if NFL is as smart at selling itself as its reputation declares, the league will find ways to take the festivities to the non-San-Francisco locals as much as possible. Santa Clara officials are planning ways for that to happen, with potential outdoor concerts at Mission College in the stadium area and a day-before-game outdoor festival at Santa Clara University. But why shouldn’t the NFL take other parts of the show to other parts of the Bay?

Maybe it will. A source in the Raiders office says the league has inquired about one of the competing Super Bowl 50 teams using the team’s practice facility in Alameda, which would mean the team would also likely stay somewhere in the East Bay, which would mean fans would probably hang out in spots around the hotel hoping to catch a glimpse of a player and absorb some Super Bowl vibes. The other competing team may practice at Stanford or San Jose State and stay someplace nearby, creating the same situation.

The Super Bowl 50 media headquarters will be in San Francisco. But there are murmurs that the annual Media Day could occur at Levi’s Stadium (if held outdoors) or O.co Coliseum or SAP Center (if held indoors). All of this would help regionalize things. Who knows? A local city could even launch a guerilla offensive, as occurred at the last Super Bowl in Arizona. The city of Scottsdale, working outside the NFL licensing net, paid ESPN a $75,000 fee to have the sports network set up its weeklong outdoors anchor desk in the Phoenix suburb, then organized a generic “Fan Fest” around the pro football festival around the TV set. It was wildly successful.

Full disclosure: I have frequently been accused of obnoxiously standing up for the South Bay and San Jose’s interests in this sort of thing because I feel the area often is overlooked nationally when it comes to being a great sports market. To this charge, I plead guilty. (Although it is not true, as some claim, that I have advocated for the Kentucky Derby and Indy 500 to move to San Jose.)

But I’m not lacking perspective. While I enjoy all parts of the Bay Area, I recognize the truth: Out-of-town fans visiting the area of the first time will want to stay in San Francisco and visit Fisherman’s Wharf. And while a pre-Super Bowl soiree at the Googleplex or other Silicon Valley hot spot sounds groovy to me in the year 2016, I understand that corporate party planners will seek to please their clients by staging extravaganzas on the San Francisco waterfront with a view of Coit Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge.

All of that is bound to happen. All of that is fine. My focus here is on all those local pro football lovers dwelling outside of San Francisco — which, remember, houses just 12 percent of the Bay Area population. These fans don’t have tickets to the game. But they still want to feel part of America’s largest sporting blowout. Why not make it easier for them to do so and open the tent as wide as possible? There is nothing in America like the Bay Area. There should be no Super Bowl like Super Bowl 50.

Sorry for such a long rant while trying to make that point. But I hope you league poobahs consider all of these facts, while undergoing your final deliberations about the logistics for next January and February. At the very least, I trust that you’ve now learned the difference between San Francisco and Santa Clara.

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